Camus's The Rebel (L'Homme revolte, 1951) traces rebellion from metaphysical revolt, the slave who says no and thereby affirms a value beyond himself, through its corruption into revolution: the 20th century's regimes that justified murder by history. His formula replaces Descartes: 'I rebel, therefore we are.' The book's attack on historical inevitability provoked the famous 1952 rupture with Sartre's circle, conducted in the pages of Les Temps modernes.
Revolt survives in pop culture as aesthetic posture, leather jackets and refusal for its own sake, precisely what Camus warned against: rebellion without the value it defends becomes mere negation, then nihilism, then permission for anything. His rebel is measured, the one who accepts limits (la mesure, Mediterranean thought) rather than totality.
The logic is compressed but real: the act of rebellion reveals something worth defending, and that something is shared, hence 'therefore we are'. Revolt is Camus's bridge from the solitary Sisyphus to a human common measure, the absurd's answer to the accusation that it produces only isolated stoics.
If rebellion says no, what exactly does it protect by saying it?